2022 Post #11 -- A Whit of Whitman

 by Brett Vogelsinger

A confession:  I am not a huge Walt Whitman fan.  

I mean, I love Dead Poets Society, and therefore "O Captain, My Captain," so I'm not a monster.  Whenever I see lilacs, I think of when they "last in the dooryard bloom'd," and I always felt the title "Leaves of Grass" was particularly wonderful.  

But when I actually sit down to read Whitman, his words don't stir my soul as I feel they are stirring his and as they stir many other readers of poetry. 

I tell this to students.  I want them to know it's OK when someone presents them with literature that is "GREAT LITERATURE" in all caps that they still have the right to taste as readers, to respect what people identify as "GREAT" about it, but also acknowledge that you are neither a shallow person nor a bad reader if it does not speak to you in the same wonderful way it speaks to others.  And I also acknowledge that if I ever took a full college course in Whitman, I'd probably feel differently, that digging in deep to study a writer's work will often lead to greater understanding and appreciation than I currently have for this particular poet's work. 

Nevertheless, most of my students will cross the Walt Whitman Bridge from Philadelphia to Camden, NJ (Whitman's hometown) on their way to the Adventure Aquarium or to see a concert, and it would feel wrong to start class with a poem every day and never introduce one of our region's most famous poets.  So I share his fame, my personal reader reaction, and a fragment of his poetry, accessible to all. This passage about animals from "Song of Myself, 32" resonates with just about everyone: 

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

We use this passage for simple exercise in paraphrase and personal connection.

I ask students: "What is this poet saying about animals?  Put it in your own words without using any of the poet's words."  I comment on how important it is to learn how to paraphrase ideas that come to us from different centuries, since older variations of English can be off-putting at first.  Without grappling with these, however, we risk losing the ideas history has produced. 

After we share a few of the paraphrases around the room, I ask students if anyone feels something akin to one of these lines when with a pet at home, and invariably someone wants to tell me about the peace they have discovered because of an animal in their own home.  

With this tiny intro to class, I name a significant American poet, share an excerpt of one of his most famous poems, practice paraphrasing, and invite personal connections.  Not bad for a small investment of time!  Do I win them over to the wonder that is Whitman's work?  No.  But I'm still working on that one myself. And that's OK.  

As Carol Jago puts it, we can read and love poetry without putting it into "a golden frame." 

Further Reading:

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth grade English teacher and NBCT at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA. He is the founding editor of Go Poems, facilitates his school's literary magazine, Sevenatenine, and contributes monthly posts at Moving Writers. Follow him on Twitter @theVogelman.